Articles by Nicole Friedman (44)

President-elect Christina Paxson is taking a crash course in all things Brunonia while keeping her day job as dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Paxson will take the reins as president July 1, and her formal inauguration will take place in October. Paxson spoke with The Herald earlier in the month about her vision for Brown.

The University mission statement grew out of its charter, a document bold enough to create a governance structure for a school with no home, professors or students. The motley crew of New England Baptists and intellectuals that gathered in Newport in 1764 — the original Corporation — had their charter signed by the Royal Governor of Rhode Island, who was appointed by King George III. They could never have foreseen the Watson Institute for International Studies, the Alpert Medical School, the Ivy League, celebrity students or the sprawling, global institution the University has become.

Brown’s Department of Political Science will continue to give undergraduates a taste of law next year when Steven Calabresi, a renowned professor at Northwestern University School of Law and a conservative legal scholar, joins the department as a visiting professor.

The maximum probationary period before a faculty member is either promoted with tenure or dismissed should be increased to eight years, according to recommendations in a report released March 25 by the ad hoc Committee to Review Tenure and Faculty Development Policies.

Pending bills in the Rhode Island General Assembly would require the state to count prisoners as residents of their hometowns — not the town the prison is in — when determining state and county legislative districts.

Finding a tenured or tenure-track position is hard enough, but locating two academic job openings at once is next to impossible. Faculty recruitment — a key priority of the University’s long-term Plan for Academic Enrichment — gets more complicated when a prospective hire’s spouse also needs a position, and universities, including Brown, are facing this situation more than ever before.

The Corporation approved a $786.6 million budget for the next fiscal year, authorized construction for capital projects and voted to reappoint two of its top members for second terms at its meeting Saturday. The University will also lay off employees at the end of this fiscal year.

The Corporation approved the merging of the Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences and the Department of Psychology into a single department at its meeting Feb. 27. While the two departments will merge when the next fiscal year begins July 1, they will not move into the renovated Metcalf Chemistry and Research Laboratory until fall 2011.This merge has been a “long time in the making,” said Provost David Kertzer ’69 P’95 P’98.

Faced with the task of further reducing the University’s projected budget deficit by $30 million, the Corporation will convene this weekend to finalize plans to balance next fiscal year’s operating budget and discuss academic priorities.

The University is currently home to 211 postdoctoral fellows and research associates in 41 departments, according to data from the Human Resources Department. Having already received doctorates, postdocs are neither students nor faculty — they have come to Brown for extra research and training before moving on to careers in academia or other industries.